Just the mention of 'Coronavirus' is enough to cause a minor panic, making people tighten their face masks and press down their sanitizer nozzles, while ears pricked for the sound of a cough. The fear is real, of course, as the number of infected people in India continues to rise every single day.
Our new normal is living in a COVID-19 infected world, whether you like it or not. This tiny parasite that you can't even see is causing such unprecedented havoc across the world, analysts say its economic cost is already reaching the levels of the Great Recession of 2008. Here are a few maps that break down the adverse impact of Coronavirus on the world.
Yup, there's no easy way to say this, but if things continue to go as they have been, with the infection rate going around the world, not only will it result in more people suffering from COVID-19, but it will mean more deaths.
The graph projects over 42 million cases of Coronavirus infected people in the next six months, with at least 1.6 million resultant deaths. These numbers are unthinkable right now!
Among the vulnerable population, the demographic that's really at risk from COVID-19 are people over the age of 50. Mortality from coronavirus increases substantially among older people.
So much about the Coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19's spread comes down to what China's doing, because what China does impacts the entire world. Through January and February, as the epidemic gathered pace in China (more than the rest of the world), the country cracked down heavily to limit the Coronavirus spread. And these measures seem to have been paid off.
Just as the rest of the world is coming to grips with Coronavirus-infected patients and finding ways to limit COVID-19's spread, China's strategy will ensure it continues to have an upper hand when compared to the rest of the world in terms of dealing with new cases -- which are expected to be significantly lesser in China than the rest of the world.
China's significant control over COVID-19's spread might just ensure its quicker return to peak manufacturing across all industries, thereby giving a boost to its own and world's economy. Meanwhile, the race is still on in certifying and releasing the first vaccine on COVID-19.
This is a good graph that visualizes when Wikipedia pages with Coronavirus mentions started getting queried and viewed across different language editions of the online encyclopedia.
It claims that the earliest Coronavirus reference on Wikipedia happened on Dec 31, 2019, in Chinese. By second week of January, jumps were witnessed in Chinese, Japanese, Korean languages. Peak activity on Wikipedia for Coronavirus views happened between Jan 25 and Jan 28, across languages, with several millions of views.
According to Statista, response to contain COVID-19's impact will take a concerted global effort -- the world is as strong as its weakest link. With that said, according to 2019's ranking of countries best and worst prepared for an epidemic are as follows:
The US, Australia, Canada, UK and France are at the top of the list when it comes to containing the pandemic spread. It's unsurprising that vast sections of Africa are extremely ill-prepared to handle a Coronavirus outbreak. India and China, along with Russia, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and most other countries have moderate levels of preparation to respond to this pandemic threat.
China's Wuhan province is where this Coronavirus infection began, and obviously China's faced the major brunt of this disease outbreak. This is bad news for the rest of the world, as China clamps down on the disease spread, which means its manufacturing industry won't be functioning at optimum level.
From smartphones to televisions, laptops to computer displays, smart speakers to smartwatches, and even video game console production is down by 10-15%. Automobiles manufacturing is lower than expected levels, too.
Chinese car sales are in free fall right now, as the country's one of the biggest markets for Japanese and German cars and the biggest car market in the world in general. Even at the end of February, daily car sales were still 89 percent down despite more dealerships reopening, according to Bloomberg.
As markets opened earlier today, oil prices crashed and sent a slippery stock market plunging further off the back of Coronavirus worries.
European and US stock market has been steadily sliding ever since Coronavirus cases started emerging out of China, and especially after WHO sounded the alarm bell. Just in the last week, the global stock market has lost $6 trillion of wealth, according to a Business Insider report.
With fear of travel spreading on a global scale, airlines have obviously felt a pinch. According to an estimate, their losses are expected to be upward of $113 billion this year, and analysts say it wasn't this bad even during 9/11 in 2001 when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City.
According to S&P, this above graph is the worst case scenario. According to another estimate from IATA, over 2 lakh flights have been cancelled between January and February itself, as non-essential travel is cancelled all over the world in an unprecedented effort to contain the Coronavirus COVID-19 spread.